Missing Plane's Scary Flight Into Darkness

NATHANIEL ZELINSKY | FRESH TALKThe Hartford Courant

What is so captivating about the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370?

For more than two weeks, international audiences followed minute-by-minute accounts of the search for the missing flight, and only this week were authorities able to begin announcing substantive findings and the conclusion that the plane went down over a remote part of the Indian Ocean. At the core of our grim fascination with this story lies a concern not just for the missing passengers, but also for ourselves: The tragedy scares us because it challenges our comforting conceptions of the modern world.

Flight MH370 is a sensation not because it crashed, but because it vanished into the night somewhere along its route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. In the age of smart phones and social media, we no longer know what it means to be disconnected. We expect to be able to contact anyone, anywhere, at any time. Global positioning system apps mean we never get lost, and Amazon delivers the world to our doorstep in 24 hours. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman, we like to believe that our world is flat.

The missing Boeing 777 is the perfect symbol of the very 21st-century technologies that link the flat world together. But instead of bridging the 2,700 miles between Kuala Lumpur and Beijeng, the plane went "off the grid" in a way that seems bizarrely archaic. As poignant as the likely death of the 239 people onboard is, it was immediately compounded by the horror of not knowing where they were.

In the first few days after the loss of contact, people around the globe repeatedly asked the same question: How could you not find something as big and sophisticated as a commercial jumbo jet?

We could not fathom being disconnected. Suddenly, the cocoon of technology in which we live seemed quite fragile.

When families initially reported that the passengers' cellphones were still ringing, it appeared that technology might solve the mystery and reconnect us with those we had lost. After investigation, however, that false hope quickly evaporated. Instead, in the course of the international search, we have relearned what the digital age has forgotten but what our ancestors always knew: Our planet is a vast place we do not control and, despite all our technology, we are small people in it. The world's best military jets and most advanced satellites cannot easily tame the fierce waters of the Indian Ocean.

To assuage our growing fears, pundits and conspiracy theorists initially concocted elaborate scenarios in which human actors were to blame for the plane's disappearance. Maybe the hijackers kept the plane hidden and its passengers alive? It was tempting to believe these theories because they allowed us to avoid the more obvious truth: Sometimes human beings find themselves lost, disconnected and alone — even in the age of instant communication.

And our 24-hour media cycle only heightens the contrast between the capabilities of our technology and its failure to provide us with answers.

Reporters sent live-tweet updates after flying in search planes, but we still lack conclusive answers and may never know what exactly happened to MH370.

For those who lost loved ones, it is a heart-wrenching disaster that deserves our sympathy. For the world, though, the missing 777 is also a lesson that the forces of technology and globalization are not as strong as we would sometimes like to think.

And so, we are enthralled — and scared — by MH370 because its mystery compels us to confront the fragility of our world.